Installing Windows 2008 R2 Enterprise — Core

Alternatively you can use Windows Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 (free) instead, as either will support the ability to create a Hyper-V cluster, but this article is written with Core R2 in mind.

The important point to note is that all machines in the cluster must run the exact same version of Windows. In other words if you use 2008 R2 Core, all machines you intend on adding to the cluster must also be 2008 R2 core. You cannot mix full and core versions, nor Hyper-V servers and Core R2 servers.

In my environment, I am setting up 5 servers to become nodes in my Hyper-V cluster. Ideally all servers have identical hardware; however in my case (and for many companies) I am using what I have on hand. This will also demonstrate that limited variations are not an issue.

Mapping SAN shared virtual disks

Now that all the servers we plan on using for our Hyper-V cluster are built and configured, we need to grant access to the SAN, put all the hosts in a group, and share our two previously created virtual disks to the host group.

Monitoring and tuning performance

Complex environments such as this there are numerous variables which affect performance. You will find that there are many different ways to monitor and tune the performance of your specific environments.

Here are some of the methods I use. The greatest influencing factors to a machine's performance are:

Disk performance

Network performance

Processor performance

Memory allocation

Keep in mind, what may be an important recource factor for one VM may be of little priority to another and each server's function will dictate what factors affect performance most. A good method of determining performance is to use application specific monitoring tools within the specific VMs, however, since there are far too many applications and variables in the real world, I will stick with the core basics of the subsystem itself, and leave application specific performance tuning to you!

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